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Virginia-based IT services and consulting company CSC is on a special mission to rope in cloud power for business customers setting out to migrate applications into cloud computing environments. On Wednesday, CSC announced its latest investment on that mission.

The company has inked a deal to acquire ServiceMesh, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based cloud management company. The companies expect to close the transaction in the third quarter of CSC’s fiscal year 2014.

In doing so, CSC further cements its position as a company with the capabilities and insights that can help clients migrate applications into a cloud environment, an assignment that is always easier said than done.

CSC President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Lawrie looks into the future and sees "a set of multiple clouds utilized simultaneously by enterprises."

Lawrie said, “ServiceMesh allows us to catalogue enterprise applications and orchestrate those applications dynamically to run in different clouds based on the characteristics of the applications.”

An Integrated Control Point

Perhaps the easiest translation of what ServiceMesh does and why it is so attractive to CSC is through customers who use the ServiceMesh Agility Platform. These customers are running clouds on different computing platforms and they need help to make sense of it all.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is designed to automate the deployment and management of enterprise applications and platforms across cloud variants, whether private or public. Customers of ServiceMesh, in the process, get a single, policy-driven, integrated control point that covers numerous issues across environments at once: , compliance, security and, for employees, self-service access.

The deal announced Wednesday will give CSC added muscle as a company that can address the new normal in mixed cloud environments: the ability to best manage the cloud environments, and the ability to support customers with proper cloud governance.

ServiceMesh has been in this “sweet spot” as a company focused on cloud management. Enterprise-scale companies are moving to more than one cloud arrangement, some private, some public. These deployments present complexities that can use some help in converged management.

Enterprise Requirements

In a blog post Wednesday, Eric Pulier, founder and CEO of ServiceMesh, said, “What we know now is that 100 percent of enterprise organizations will operate in a hybrid cloud environment. And every one of these organizations will require a new way to release, deploy and manage applications and services across these environments.”

Pulier said it is clear now that not all clouds are equal because business needs vary. Some clouds are private to handle security and data privacy requirements. Some are public to obtain economies of scale and cut costs. There are other issues too.

“Some are better for low latency applications. Some are better for storage. Some are cheaper and some are more expensive for reasons that have to do with their particular applicability to a specific class of applications,” he said. “In fact, it’s the nature of the application that matters more than anything else in selecting what cloud to run it on.”

Enterprise-scale businesses in financial services, healthcare and other industries have climbed on board as ServiceMesh customers. For example, Swisscom IT Services' Chief Executive Officer Andreas Koenig said that Swisscom is building its next-generation cloud offerings with the ServiceMesh Agility Platform. Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Chief Information Officer Michael Harte said that ServiceMesh Agility Platform is an element of its cloud operating model.

In the new deal, existing customers of ServiceMesh will leverage CSC’s global network of consultants, application developers, software engineers, and other IT professionals. ServiceMesh will have access to CSC's global sales, marketing, and development teams.

According to CSC, the company has 81,000 employees in over 70 countries, with offices on four continents, North America, Australia, Europe and Asia.